After a glitchy start, Trump encounters a sympathetic interviewer in Elon Musk
Donald Trump’s return to the social media platform X, more than three years after he was banned following his supporters’ Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, got off to an awkward start Monday as his scheduled live X conversation with tech billionaire Elon Musk was beset by technical glitches.
The former president’s return to his once-favored online soapbox — where he has a following of more than 88 million — should have offered him the opportunity to pitch his message directly to a vast swath of voters as he faces a tight race against the Democratic nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris.
But for 40 minutes, hundreds of thousands of viewers who tried to tune in to Spaces, the company’s audio livestreaming feature, to hear what Trump billed as “the greatest interview in history” met an error message that read: “Details not available.”
Some heard elevator music. Then silence.
Musk was quick to blame the difficulties on hackers — a claim that could not immediately be verified.
“There appears to be a massive [distributed denial-of-service] attack on 𝕏,” Musk posted on his platform. “Worst case, we will proceed with a smaller number of live listeners and post the conversation later.”
When the conversation began, Musk apologized for the late start and said X’s servers had been attacked, taking the opportunity to make a political point: “There’s a lot of opposition to people just hearing what President Trump has to say,” he said.
Musk was an obsequious interviewer. After praising Trump’s courage under fire when the former president reminisced at length about his attempted assassination in Butler, Pa., Musk spent most of their more than two-hour conversation agreeing with Trump as he ran through a litany of familiar falsehoods from the campaign trail on immigration and the economy.
A typical question from Musk: “Would it be accurate to say you’re supportive of legal immigration, but we also need to shut down unvetted illegal immigration?”
Even when Musk asked new questions — probing Trump on European Commissioner Thierry Breton’s letter to Musk earlier that day urging him to adhere to European Union regulations and moderate “potentially harmful content” — he did not press Trump as the GOP nominee avoided answering and pivoted to his typical complaints about NATO.
Musk, who described himself as a moderate, did not pretend to be impartial.
“I think we’re at a fork in the road of destiny of civilization and I think we need to take the right path,” he told Trump as the conversation drew to a close. “I think you’re the right path.”
Until Monday, Trump had posted on the platform formerly known as Twitter only once since Musk bought the site and reinstated his account in November 2022. But the GOP nominee is now struggling to regain campaign momentum as polls show his lead narrowing since President Biden stepped aside July 21 and endorsed Harris.
Since Musk acquired X for $44 billion in 2022 and set about transforming its ethos and mechanics — slashing staffing and cutting content moderation — the site has lost some followers and advertisers. It also faces heightened competition from rival platforms, such as ByteDance’s TikTok, Meta’s Threads and Truth Social, the site Trump launched in 2022 in response to his bans from Facebook and Twitter.
The glitches were an embarassment for Musk. Trump’s return to X was supposed to provide the Tesla chief executive an opportunity to revive his struggling social media platform and bolster its status as a central hub for political news.
Ahead of the scheduled conversation, Musk said that X was conducting “some system scaling tests” in an attempt to accommodate the high volume of people expected to tune in.
The technical difficulties harked back to the challenges Musk had hosting Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ presidential campaign launch in May, when his “live chat” on Twitter Spaces crashed after about 20 minutes of mostly silence.
Donald Trump’s campaign is banking on younger male voters as he adjusts to the reality of a new presidential contest against Vice President Kamala Harris.
Before the event started, Ammar Moussa, a Harris campaign spokesman, dismissed it as a platform for lies, characterizing Trump and his “billionaire sugar daddy” as “infamous for their relationship with the truth.”
After it wrapped up, the Harris-Walz campaign was quick to mock the conversation: “Trump’s entire campaign is in service of people like Elon Musk and himself — self-obsessed rich guys who will sell out the middle class and who cannot run a livestream in the year 2024,” the campaign said in a statement.
Trump, who has long presented himself as the victim of persecution by the political and media elite, posted a flurry of posts Monday on X, starting with a 2½-minute campaign video that juxtaposed large crowds of his supporters alongside news reports of FBI agents searching his Mar-a-Lago estate and his prosecution by the Justice Department.
“I never thought anything like this could happen in America,” Trump said in a voice-over. “The only crime that I have committed is to fearlessly defend our nation from those who seek to destroy it. The more that a broken system tells you that you’re wrong, the more certain you should be that you must keep pushing ahead.”
Trump went online knowing that Musk would be a sympathetic host.
A once-frequent Democratic supporter who backed Biden in the last presidential election, the entrepreneur has drifted rightward since 2020 and become a frequent troll of left-wing politics and what he dubs the “woke mind virus.” Last month, Musk spoke out against a new California law that prohibits mandating that teachers notify families about student gender identity changes and announced he’s moving the X and SpaceX headquarters from California to Texas.
After the former president survived an assassination attempt at a Butler, Pa., rally a month ago, Musk said he “fully” endorsed Trump. He also helped set up a political action committee to financially support Trump’s campaign.
Over the last year, X has played a key role in the presidential campaign.
Last month, President Biden announced he was suspending his presidential campaign in a letter posted on X. A year ago, Trump used X when he skipped the first GOP presidential primary debate and sought to undercut his Republican opponents by appearing in a prerecorded interview with former Fox News Channel host Tucker Carlson, which aired on X.
X, then called Twitter, “permanently suspended” Trump’s account in 2021 after his supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to halt the certification of the election.
Former President Trump reportedly has used a slur often targeted at women to describe Vice President Kamala Harris during private conversations.
“After close review of recent Tweets from the @realDonaldTrump account and the context around them we have permanently suspended the account due to the risk of further incitement of violence,” Twitter announced in a tweet.
A month after buying the platform in 2022, Musk asked the public: Should the former president’s social media account be reinstated? Fifteen million accounts voted, and 51.8% were in favor of letting Trump return.
“The people have spoken,” Musk wrote.
Last August, Trump posted a photo of his mug shot after he surrendered to authorities in Georgia on charges he conspired to overturn his the 2020 election. “Election interference,” the caption read. “Never Surrender!”
But he told Fox News he preferred to comment on Truth Social.
“I am not going on Twitter. I am going to stay on Truth,” Trump told Fox News in April 2022. “I hope Elon buys Twitter because he’ll make improvements to it and he is a good man, but I am going to be staying on Truth.”
Trump posted more frequently Monday on Truth Social than Twitter, sharing a stream of Breitbart stories, a New York Post front page, and personal rants characterizing Harris as a fraud who flip-flopped on policy.
But he has only 7.5 million followers on Truth Social. It’s unclear how loyal he will remain to the platform as his margins shrink in critical battleground states such as Arizona, Georgia and Nevada.
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